Where the film completely falls down is in director Joshua Michael Stern’s disastrous decision to cast Ashton Kutcher in the central role.

Ana de Armas stars as a new, lethally dull trainee assassin, Keanu Reeves makes an emergency cameo, and the film is an absolute stinker.

This would-be-frothy date flick is a sub-"Meet the Fockers" dog’s dinner.

You can sense what Dahan’s aiming at: by introducing the spectre of Hitch early on, he lays out Grace’s existence as a kind of lived-in Hitchcock thriller... But the acting is so heightened, and the script so thoroughly awful, that Dahan’s idea – his big and seemingly only one – can’t begin to stick.

The action is slapstick-driven, yet the set-pieces are all so transparently bogus – with fourth-rate CGI and actors’ digital doubles flopping about the place like haunted marionettes – that they play as insulting rather than outrageous.

The level of psychological nuance in Desch’s script, not to mention feminist enlightenment, makes EL James look like Virginia Woolf.

Connoisseurs of the accidentally ludicrous will find much to laugh at here.... But scares and intrigue are both in miserably short supply.

The film never tries to do anything other than look good, and is hellishly ugly even so.

A psychotically unfunny art-heist romp.

Seventh Son would hardly be the first film to use "strong female characters" as a means of waving its misogyny under the radar, but it’s seldom carried off as depressingly as this.

Transcendence is the worst, most portentous, and certainly the silliest big-budget science fiction film since the 2008 Keanu Reeves remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still.

A shambolic film populated by some of the most aggressively charmless characters ever seen in a blockbuster.

A second instalment of the Oz origin movie is bloated and boring despite new songs for both Elphaba and Glinda.

Disasters: well, they said it. The new film from Dennis Dugan is a frighteningly inept stab at a romantic comedy in the Nancy Meyers style.

No child deserves to be subjected to this kind of blaringly witless branding bombardment; as for adults, I felt like I was being beaten around the head with the Argos catalogue.

As a motor-mouthing smart-ass, the 58-year-old Pitt is badly miscast – every detail here seems tailored to Ryan Reynolds, director David Leitch’s Deadpool collaborator – while the film's bulging cast and bloated running time recalls those all-star capers of the 1960s: imagine It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World crossed with a migraine. For the sake of all that’s holy, take the bus.

So, what happens in Grown Ups 2? Almost absolutely nothing.

How can it be possible that nine years have passed since the previous instalment, yet every facet of this one feels so woefully first-draft? Expend4bles: wh4t a lo4d of cr4p.

The film is close to parody – not of anything Potter’s ever done, but of male artists and their obsessive end-of-life regrets. If you’d told me it was a shelved adaptation of late Philip Roth done by Alejandro González Iñárritu in Birdman (or Biutiful) mode, I’d have believed it in a shot.

It’s not the most hideous of premises, particularly in early, ultimately fruitless, moments that suggest Patrick could be some sort of four-legged genie. But the film struggles to congeal, falling back on laboured gags set up with mechanical lack-of-ease.

The level of not very funny things this entails, even by the standards of barely-awaited sequels to lowbrow Yuletide comedies, is kind of impressive.

Zemeckis can’t let go of his ghastly conviction that everything has to be heart-tugging schmaltz. Alan Silvestri’s ruinously sickly score is his main accomplice.

While the del Toro Hellboys were postmodern Frankenstein fables, shining with pathos, fun and fairy-tale allure, this unsolicited reboot is ugly, obnoxious and yowlingly witless, with nothing to say for itself that doesn’t start with the letter F.

There is a noxious undead pong emanating from this latest entry in the 1980s franchise, which is now being necromantically sustained through force of sheer commercial desperation, and nothing else.

Antebellum doesn’t so much concertina the past and the present as do a leering jig back and forth, then blow you a callous raspberry instead.

A pound-store Tarantino with the sadism dialled up and the wit switched off, Roth has the very basics of a stomach-clenching suspense sequence down pat. It’s just that the film never provides any rationale for why you’d want to submit to it.

If every last joke in it wasn’t built on the premise that anyone who isn’t a straight, white, able-bodied, middle-class male isn’t intrinsically laughable, it might have made for lively comedy.

Essentially – astonishingly – the Tom and Jerry sections of Tom & Jerry are a sideshow, used to punctuate the human scheming and blundering around Preeta and Ben’s forthcoming nuptials.